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24 April 2026

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Opinion

Trustees beware: know your legal duties!

If there is a single part of the academy system that needs our urgent attention, it is trusteeship, argues Leora Cruddas There is still much that is misunderstood about the differences between governing a local authority-maintained school, governing a single academy trust and governing a multi-academy trust. At its most extreme, this lack of understanding […]

Free schools can’t be judged as a homogenous group

Tom Richmond is wrong on one thing, argues Thomas Byrne. There already are numerous free school successes – and more than a few that have gone wrong It’s true that it’s too early to tell whether the free schools programme has lived up to its champions’ claims; the former DfE advisor Tom Richmond was correct […]

Schools: you must tell pupils about apprenticeships!

After news broke that only two of the 10 largest multi-academy trusts are actually implementing the so-called Baker Clause, which requires schools to allow technical education providers access to their pupils, the man who fought for the clause in the first place explains why it is so vital that every school complies A recent survey […]

How school leaders can be sucked into dodgy dealings

Before I became a teacher I briefly worked for KPMG, one of the world’s largest auditors. It was shortly after the fall of Enron, itself one of the world’s largest accountancy firms, after its senior leaders were discovered up to their necks in fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy, among other things. The fall of Enron […]

Free schools: do their outcomes justify the cost?

There’s not enough evidence yet to see whether free schools have worked, says Tom Richmond, but what we do now know is quite how expensive the project has been When Toby Young, the director of the New Schools Network, said last summer that free schools were “the most successful education policy of the post-war period”, […]

The reception year isn’t all about learning to read

The UK’s dogmatic approach to teaching reading does a disservice to the different ways and speeds at which young children learn, writes Jan Dubiel Ofsted’s recent Bold Beginnings report was controversial for several reasons, not least because it appeared to suggest that the core purpose of the reception year is learning how to read. Literacy […]

Education ministers need to stop arguing about skills

It is beyond tedious to watch two ministers argue in public over the meaning of the word ‘skills’ when they could be fixing education, writes Laura McInerney One of my favourite questions to ask people is this: “If you were invisible for the day, what would you do?” It always throws them off. Sometimes they […]

Progress 8 is biased towards grammar schools – here’s the solution

The school progress measures were a step in the right direction, but in their current form they can only partially correct for intake ability, writes Tom Perry As we have known for decades, and the data clearly shows, raw attainment scores such as schools’ GCSE results say more about schools’ intakes than their performance. The […]

Universal Infant Free School Meals – what has the impact been so far?

Some parents and school leaders believe free lunches are having positive effects on the lives of infants and their families, but the costs to schools may become unsustainable unless the government keeps an eye on how much money it provides, writes Peter Sellen, who co-authored the EPI’s new report In September 2013, the previous coalition […]